He shook Romania’s political landscape in November when he secured the first round in the presidential election, going from an obscure candidate to beating the incumbent prime minister. Calin Georgescu,

Romanian far-right populist Calin Georgescu has been barred from participating in May's presidential election rerun by the country's Central Electoral Bureau. In December, Romania's constitutional court annulled the first round of the vote - in which he came first - after intelligence revealed Russia had been involved in 800 TikTok accounts backing him.